2023 might not have the flying cars and robot maids that the movies and TV shows predicted 50 years ago, but they weren’t wrong about the speed of digital acceleration and its impact on our lives. While we might have to wait a little longer for space highways, technological advancements have shown itself in other ways.
There is no arguing that technology has vastly changed how we live our lives and run our businesses. It’s allowed us to respond quickly as things change – and the more disruption we see, the more reliant we become on technology.
While arguments fly around about AI and whether it will aid or destroy us, it’s true that, for the most part, digital transformation has benefited businesses. We wouldn’t have remote work, automation, or eCommerce without it.
The possibilities will only continue to grow. However, IT infrastructure can limit the ability to implement these new capabilities – you can only go as far as your current infrastructure will take you. So, it’s important to understand the role of infrastructure and how it can be set up to serve in a digital age, continue to support through change and transformation, and what good looks like.
Understanding the current state of IT infrastructure
IT infrastructure varies from business to business, as it will be defined, but what each organisation requires to operate and manage their IT services and IT environments.
The goal of any organisation should be to have IT infrastructure that is flexible, reliable and secure. This will ensure the ability to compete in market, maintain high productivity and secure data and systems – among other things.
Many organisations are dealing with ageing IT infrastructure that offers only some or none of these features. Legacy systems (particularly data centres) can’t provide the flexibility required to keep up with the digital acceleration we’re continuing to experience across multiple sectors or the transformation goals of individual organisations.
This not only impacts security and productivity but also the profitability of an organisation. Legacy systems incur higher maintenance and upgrade costs just to keep up with emerging technology, offer limited scalability and deliver longer time to market.
It’s no surprise 44% of CIOs believe legacy systems are a major barrier to growth.
The key components of a modern IT infrastructure
A modern, fit-for-purpose IT infrastructure will look slightly different for different businesses. But generally, the optimal infrastructure will provide:
- business high-performance storage,
- low-latency network,
- security,
- an optimised wide area network (WAN),
- virtualisation, and
- zero downtime.
For some, optimal infrastructure can also include software, containerisation, big data and AI integration.
IT infrastructure should provide flexibility and reliability to manage ongoing disruption and change, high-level security for increasing threats, and no increase (or preferably, a decrease) in overall IT costs. It’s these benefits that have many organisations migrating to cloud infrastructure, which utilises virtualisation to enable users to access computing resources via the internet rather than having to install them on-premise.
At least 42% of Australian businesses are now using cloud (over 80% of large businesses) – a number that looks to increase significantly by 2025.
How and when to modernise
Modernisation allows you to keep your applications maintained, managed and up to speed to meet your (and your customers) needs – now and into the future.
Organisations will often look to modernise applications after they’ve migrated to cloud. However, this approach can limit flexibility in the future. Modernising before migration can position your organisation for greater portability in the future – allowing it to work with legacy infrastructure in the first instance but with the scalability and flexibility to move to a cloud environment in the future.
Companies that are modernising applications and infrastructure to more sophisticated levels are enjoying a range of benefits and competitive advantages, including:
- Improved customer experience
- Enhanced security
- Faster innovation
- Scalable workloads
- Lower costs
Bringing your IT infrastructure up to speed
While modern IT infrastructure will look different for every business, nearly every modernisation projects are highly complex, large scale and mission-critical. That means the right approach, planning and expertise are required to ensure a positive outcome.
Mining systems and support company Orica recently underwent a migration to cloud from their legacy data centres, including the modernisation of over 100 applications, with a goal to reduce their excessively high operational costs and compliance risks.
Partnering with SXiQ, Orica was able to complete their migration project in just 15 months, achieving a 35% Uptime Improvement and 30% IT Support Cost Improvement in the process. Read about the full project here.
SXiQ specialises in complex migrations and transformation journeys. Our complete Migrate and Modernise offering, including workloads and application assessments, supports organisations to Plan, Design and Implement strategies to migrate their workloads to the cloud at scale.
If you’re looking to modernise your IT infrastructure and maximise your organisation’s digital transformation, get in touch to discuss how we can help you meet your goals.
Contact us here.
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